Japan -- History -- Meiji period, 1868-1912 -- Fiction
The letters from home set me straight again. If ever a human being was
blessed with a good family and good friends it is my unworthy self!
The past week has been unusually exciting. First we had a wedding on
hand. The bride is a girl who has been educated in the school, so of
course we were all interested. Some time ago, the middle-man, who does
all the arranging, came to her father and said a young teacher in the
Government school desired his daughter in marriage. The father
without consulting the girl investigated the suitor's standing, and
finding it satisfactory, said yea. So little Otoya was told that she
was going to be married, and the groom elect was invited to call.
I was on tiptoe with curiosity to see what would happen, but the
meeting took place behind closed doors. Otoya told me afterwards that
she had never seen the young man until he entered the room, but they
both bowed three times, then she served tea while her mother and
father talked to him. "Didn't you talk to him at all?" I asked. She
looked horrified. "No, that would have been most immodest!" she
said. "But you peeped at him," I insisted. She shook her head, "That
would have been disgrace." Now that was three months ago and she
hadn't seen him until Monday when they were married.
At our suggestion they decided to have an American wedding and I was
appointed mistress of ceremonies. It was great fun, for we had a best
man, besides brides-maids and flower girls, and Miss Lessing played
the Wedding March for them to enter. The arrangements were somewhat
difficult owing to the fact that the Japanese consider it the height
of vulgarity to discuss anything pertaining to the bride or the
wedding. They excused me on the ground that I was a foreigner.
The affair was really beautiful! The little bride's outer garment was
the finest black crepe, but under it, layer after layer, were slips of
rainbow tinted cob-web silk that rippled into sight with every
movement she made. And every inch of her trousseau was made from the
cocoons of worms raised in her own house, and was spun into silk by
her waiting maids.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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